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“Fuck.” The curse came out as a breath. He slid up against the wall and pulled out his gun. The footsteps had stopped. His imagination? No, Diego didn’t allow himself imagination in situations like this. That was why he wasn’t dead.
He moved down the hallway. A light was on around the corner. Diego’s whole body iced over. His thoughts washed out.
A shadow moved across the light, short, stunted. Not big enough to be a person.
He sighed. A maintenance drone. That was all this was, a fucking robot.
But then the first was joined by a second shadow, and this one was tall enough to be a man.
“What is it?” A man’s voice, calm, undisturbed. “There shouldn’t be anyone here.”
Diego’s mind split in two, and he saw both of his possible futures. He could try to get out undetected. Or he could go around the corner and find out who was here. And kill him, most likely.
He knew which option Mr. Cabrera would prefer. Which option Mr. Cabrera had trained him for, all those cold days down at the docks as a kid.
Diego stepped forward.
The shadows drowned out the light.
He took a deep breath.
The maintenance drone came around the corner first, squat and rolling. Diego kicked it, hard enough that it flipped onto its back. The man let out a shout, rounded the corner.
“You,” Diego said, and then, without thinking, fired.
It was the robot, the andie who’d showed up with Sofia when she’d reprogrammed the icebreakers. The one who looked like a man.
Diego’s bullet exploded the plaster in the wall, and the andie ducked, disappeared around the corner.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Diego shouted, chasing after him. He jerked around the corner and fired again. Missed. The andie looked at him over his shoulder. Something metal caught in the light, even though this andie wasn’t metallic at all.
The motherfucker was armed.
“What the hell?” Diego fired again. The andie jerked away, but fired off his own shot before he dove into the cavern of the kitchen. Pain blossomed along Diego’s forearm. It melted into sticky warmth.
He was bleeding.
He was shot.
“Shit!” Diego slapped his free hand on his wound and slammed up against the wall, breathing hard. The robot didn’t reappear. Diego knew that if the andie saw him again, the andie wouldn’t miss. It was a fucking computer. Luck was the only reason his first shot hadn’t landed in Diego’s heart.
Diego took a deep breath. Pain surged; blood seeped through his fingers. He peeled himself off the wall and ran, leaving the maintenance drone trilling on the floor. No time to think.
He tore out of the house, raced through the golden grass. The only sound was his heartbeat and his own breath. He ran parallel to the train tracks, headed toward the dome’s edge. The very place he’d killed a woman last night. It’d make sense, him dying out here on the edge. But he didn’t want to. He had to find a contact station. Get one of Mr. Cabrera’s robots to send one of those reinforced ice automobiles to fetch him.
Two kilometers between this dome and Hope City proper. Might as well be the whole fucking world.
Diego stopped and sucked in deep gasping breaths. His arm was numb, tingling and weak. He glanced back. No one had followed. Southstar was a blaze of light in the darkness. Blood had soaked into his side and dripped down onto his legs. He crouched in the grass, knowing that if the andie wanted to find him, the grass wouldn’t hide him. He checked his wound. Not as bad as it seemed—the bullet had only grazed him. He straightened up and stumbled forward. His thoughts were clouded and thick, but above all else he wondered why the fucking andie had been in the woman’s house, carrying a gun like some avenging angel.
Mr. Cabrera would be interested in hearing about this.
Diego didn’t know how long he walked. Ten minutes, fifteen. He knew, intellectually, that he wouldn’t walk for long—the dome wasn’t that big. But time stretched out. He walked, his arm ached, he thought about the andie firing off a shot.
And then the grass gave way to dirt and then the dirt gave way to concrete and then the dome wall loomed out of the darkness, coated in ice and snow. The air was colder too, but not as cold as the air down at the docks, or even in the smokestack district. Diego stopped and craned his neck. The wall disappeared into the darkness overhead. He wondered about maintenance drones. They’d all be the woman’s, no doubt, watching him, reporting.
Reporting to who?
He moved on. Contact stations were usually located next to exits, since the exits were intended for robots, mostly maintenance drones that ran among the inhabited domes and the power plants. Diego wasn’t certain where he was. When he’d fled the house, he’d run in the direction he remembered driving last night. There should be an exit nearby, unless he’d overshot wildly, in which case—he didn’t know. He didn’t think he’d bleed to death, but he wasn’t sure. Even if it did make a fucked-up sort of cosmic sense.
Diego walked. The wind whistled over the dome, loud and piercing. It reminded him of last night, and the way the woman had stared so defiantly at Mr. Cabrera, like she wasn’t scared of him. And that had been her problem, Diego thought. She hadn’t been scared of him. She hadn’t taken him seriously, because he wasn’t like her, and she’d barely registered his existence.
They’d learn, the aristocrats. So would everyone else, for that matter. Mr. Cabrera owned half the city, and he would make them all part of his world eventually, the same way he’d made Diego part of his world all those years ago, when Diego had been orphaned and full of an angry energy that Mr. Cabrera knew how to fu
Up ahead, an imperfection appeared on the unblemished glass of the dome. “Thank Christ!” Diego shouted, and he lurched forward in a half stumble, half run. The exit was the outline of a square set into the glass, but Diego ignored it in favor of the little gray call box next to it. He flipped it open, his hands shaking. A keypad gleamed back at him.
He punched in a string of numbers he’d memorized a long time ago. Diego held his breath, hoping the code would work here, in a private dome.
A long, trembling moment.
And then the call box switched on, a red light appearing next to the speaker. Diego blew out a rush of relieved air. He punched in the code for Mr. Cabrera’s robots.
The light switched to green.
“This is Diego Amitrano!” He pressed the hand of his uninjured arm against the glass, steadying himself, but then jerked it away at the cold, so sharp it was like heat. “I’m in the private dome housing Southstar. I’m in need of outside evacuation.” His words were sharp and ragged. The light glowed green. He pressed the 0 key. The light blinked to red.
He waited.
The light blinked once. Diego closed his eyes and let out another sigh of relief.
“On our way, Mr. Amitrano.” The voice was mechanized. Robotic. But a robot Mr. Cabrera’d had programmed long before that fucking Sofia had showed up.
“Thank you,” Diego said, out of habit, because the light was red and the robot on the end couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t care, either.
He stepped backward and took a deep breath. The darkness hemmed him in. Sofia’s assistant had shot him. What did that say about Sofia?
And what did it say about the woman, that the robot was in her house in the first place?
Diego shivered. He wrapped his good arm around his chest and squatted down, trying to draw in all his warmth. The andie hadn’t followed him. But activating the call box would alert the dome’s maintenance drones to his location.
Jesus. Diego pulled out his gun again, his arm trembling.
But he was alone.
The wait seemed to stretch on for hours. When the exit door shuddered and slid open, Diego shouted in triumph and tipped over backward, landing on his ass in the dirt.